It's springtime, which means that Princeton University Press is having its annual 50% off spring sale. From May 4th through June 9th, you can get 50% off nearly every single print, e-book, and audiobook from Princeton University Press. Just go to press.prinston.edu to get 50% off incredible books like Disneyland and the Rise of Automation. And beyond belief, how evidence shows what really works.
There are so many fantastic books you can get an incredible deal on. Go to press.prinston.edu and use the code spring50. That's sp-r-i-n-g-50 at press.prinston.edu. This day only lasts for a month, so go and get some books.
Hello. Thank you for joining us. We're proud to welcome you to our special series, In Chains, brought to you by Brill, where we talk about the history and the current state of slavery and human trafficking. I'm your host, Lee Jung Graco.
Today we're speaking with Professor Raphael Lambert at the Department of American and British Cultural Studies at Kansai University in Osaka, Japan. Raphael Lambert has lived in Japan for almost 20 years. He lives in Kyoto and teaches African American literature and culture in the Department of American and British Cultural Studies at Kansai University in Osaka. He's published essays in the Journal of Modern Literature, Critique Studies in Contemporary Fiction, and the African American Review.
His latest essay from Edward Gleason's The Open Boat to the Age of Mass Migration appears in the collective cosmopolitanisms, race, and ethnicity, cultural perspectives. In his book, Narrating the Slave Trade, Theorizing Community, Lambert examines several pieces of writing depicting community in the slave trade and the African American experience, such as Charles Johnson's Middle Passage, Ralph Ellison's The Invisible Man, and Barry Unsworth's The Sacred Hunger. Professor Lambert, thanks so much for joining us today. Thank you.
Nice to be with you. So first of all, how does the notion of community serves an effective tool for understanding the slave trade? I'm aware that looking at the slave trade through the prism of community seems paradoxical, even perhaps absurd. But when I began to read stories about the slave trade, I realized that the recurring motif in all these stories is community, community in all its forms and manifestations.
My discovery was this slave trade fiction refies the trope of community, and this is what I try to explicate in my book. So what I did in the first three chapters of the book is to discuss through fiction about the slave trade, various forms of community, such as racial community, political community, and utopian community. The reason for the pervading presence of the theme of community in such fiction, maybe that the slave trade takes the human experience to its limit, and that community is at the core and at the origin of the human experience. This particular dimension of community is what I explore in my last chapter.
I use in particular French philosopher Jean-Luc Nouncy's concept of being with or being together to assess his claim that there is an, quote, an originary or ontological sociality, quote unquote, that exists before any form of socialization. And then I put this theory in parallel with Martinique and poet and thinker in World War I's concepts of relation and queerness. Nouncy and Glissant share the idea that community as a project must be reimagined as something that pre-exists any form of socialization or acculturation. For them, for Nouncy and Glissant, the notion of community as we know it is flawed, faulty.
Our world has distorted the communal essence of the human experience, and we must find a way to restore this essence, this ontological quality of it. With Glissant, the middle passage becomes a violent birth. The birth of a new people, a Creole people, freed from a founding myth or a great narrative that leaves no room for improvisation, creativity, and change. From the trauma of the middle passage, Glissant imagines a model for a new global community.
And so Glissant provides a theory of community that takes its root in the slave trade. You write that, Tameango and Roots fail to send a truly progressive message that the more these stories make, racial community the core element of their argument, the more it backfires. And this question of whether racial difference should be emphasized is a recurring theme in your book. Can you just talk about that a bit more?
Yes, this is a very important question because it's about the slave trade and it's also about us today in the 21st century. Both Tambango and Roots emphasize the notion of racial community. Historically, we know that racial identification has not come naturally to the captives in the whole of the slave ship. Racial identification is imposed on the captives.
Black consciousness comes out of necessity as a response to white oppression. Now, race is a reality. Of course, we do look different from one continent to the next. But race is also a construction.
Before the slave trade, Africans did not think of themselves as black. They thought of themselves as members of a tribe or a culture. I focused on the display of racial solidarity in both Tambango and Roots to show that racial identification is not only artificial, but also crippling because it forces individuals to give a part of their complexity as human beings. In a way, when you reduce your sense of self to your racial identity, you fulfill the dream of those who forced you to be no more than a race.
And in a way, too, you become complicit in your own oppression. Now there is a caveat to this. They are obvious historical circumstances from the slave trade to colonization, channel slavery, Jim Crow, the carceral state, et cetera, that have helped maintain this separation of people into self-enclosed racial communities. And my point is neither to deny this reality of race, nor to ignore race-based inequalities.
My problem is this. I find it disturbing that all the way to the 21st century, we are trapped in an age-old rigid form of racial polarization. Today, this racial polarization is at its peak, and many people view the world in a very dualistic and simplistic manner, white versus known white. Race ideology, both rules and ruins our societies, hence we will strike the right balance between ignoring race and making race our prime identifier.
In such a system, in this ideal system, racial singularities are taken into account, but they are also answerable to a greater common project. The purpose is to create an environment in which every group becomes an active and indispensable part of the whole structure. This implies negotiations, debates and compromises. And this is what democracy is about.
One of the key virtues of the Black Lives Matter movement, at least as its founders conceived it, is its multiracial composition. If you go to a BLM rally, you will see the diversity of the crowd. And you will see that this crowd is quite young, and these two means very encouraging. Black Lives Matter is not about racial essentialism.
It's about injustice. And fighting injustice cannot be based on the economy, white versus known white. It must transcend race, because injustice has no color. That's a really interesting way to frame it.
And I like how you took it out of just this historical fiction context and related it to what's going on now. Moving on from just talking about race, let's move on to race and patriotism. Can you tell us why both Rutherford, Calhoun and the titular character in The Invisible Man turn to patriotism when America rejects and subjugates them? So it's surprising indeed that both Rutherford, Calhoun and Charles Johnson, the nameless protagonist in Ralph Elisom's Invisible Man choose to play by the rules of a nation that has ostracized them because of the color of their skin.
Both Calhoun and the Invisible Man are young men faced with a dilemma. What can they do to disrupt a system that denies the black community, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? The first option is to go revolutionary and reply to violence with violence, but they both feel this is not the solution. And the reasons for that.
On the slave ship, Calhoun has witnessed a successful slave insurrection, which results in a mere inversion of power. The oppressed have begun the oppressors. This is not a better world. This is a world in reverse.
As for the Invisible Man, it gets drawn into a race riot that was fermented by the Brotherhood, a political organization that manipulates the Harlem community for its own benefit. The Invisible Man escapes the police and finds refuge in an underground hideout. But the satisfaction of evading the police wears off quickly and he soon realizes that he has to do something. Both Calhoun and the Invisible Man choose to fight the system with the tools the system puts at their disposal.
And that's the second option. Those tools are first and foremost what Ralph Ellison calls the sacred papers by which he means the declaration of independence, the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights. This requires absolute faith in the American political institutions. And it is based on the belief that if the values of the founding fathers are respected and the laws implemented, then America will be the most democratic nation in the world.
Calhoun and the Invisible Man are not gullible. They know how flawed and unfair the American political system is. But what matters here is that they both decide to behave like patriots. But their patriotism is not self-interested patriotism.
We're not talking proud boy patriotism here. We're talking about constitutional patriotism or civic patriotism. In that form of patriotism, you respect the ideals of the political culture you share with other citizens. Of course, in such a system, you will have to relinquish some of your racial, ethnic or religious allegiance.
But the system is not close to pluralism, under contrary. So long as your racial, ethnic or religious allegiance is compatible with the ideals of the larger community, usually a nation or a culture, there is no objection to it. If you find yourself at variance with the values of cultural practices and shrine in a social contract, you're welcome to voice your dissent. You may contest some of the social and political practices in place.
So long as your goal is to breathe about reforms that will enhance the common good. The way to overcome discrimination and prejudice in the United States has always been done by reinterpreting the Constitution and creating laws against discrimination. In other words, the crusade against racism in the United States goes through the enactment of federal laws that protect individual rights. When such a law is adopted, it becomes the law of the land and it is always done in the name of all the citizens, regardless of color, regardless of race, regardless of religion, regardless of sexual sexual preferences, etc.
Every state and every individual must abide by such a law. We do know what is going to happen to Calhoun when he's back in the US and to the invisible man when he comes out of his lair. But we know that they want to be active citizens and fight injustice through the political and legal tools the nation has put at their disposal. And it is in this sense that they are patriots.
And I think that's really interesting that you brought that up saying that both characters are not naive. They know that these are flawed systems because one thing I think that I struggled with reading both those stories or your or your recount and your breakdown of those stories was how they continue to have faith in the Constitution. Given the Constitution is not only a flawed document, but written by people who also subjugated African Americans and women and Native Americans, it feels like it would be difficult to have faith in those documents. Oh, no, absolutely.
And I mean, until Lincoln, I think all the presidents were slave owners, whether they had a few slaves or any slaves at Jefferson. So that's something to take into account. We know that they carefully took the word slavery out of the Constitution. And it's a document with a lot of problems.
But yes, it's important to emphasize the fact that they're not gullible, but somehow they stick to this belief that American democracy has the potential to change things. Now, if we look at it from our viewpoint today, the 21st century with everything that's just happened, we must wonder if Calhoun and the invisible man made the right choice. But maybe what they teach us is that we should still hope that we can improve things with legal means that I think that's very important and to constitutional and legal means. Again, what I found really interesting about your book was how all of these stories relate to contemporary issues today.
We're reading about the slave trade in the mid 18th century, but it really has lessons for the contemporary reader. Can you talk about the parallels between the slave trade in the mid 18th century as depicted in Barry Unsworth novel, The Sacred Hunger and the resurgence of less a fair capitalism in the 1980s and the US and the UK? I'll start with one remark. Many works of fiction on the slave trade actually came out in the early 1990s about 10 years after the emergence of what has been called neoliberalism.
Sacred Hunger came out in 1992 and Barry Unsworth at the time talked of his engagement with a neoliberal ideology of the Thatcher years. Now, the sacred hunger of the title refers to the worship of money and profit, which is at the root of the transatlantic slave trade. I want to know, though, so that the novel begins in Liverpool in 1752, the year the crown monopoly over the triangular trade was dissolved. So in 1752, the crown of England was not in charge of the slave trade anymore.
The new company in charge of the slave trade was still a chartered company, but it was very much in the hands of investors and shareholders. And so this means that the slave trade was suddenly open to free trade. And as a result, slave trade activities, business grew exponentially competition became fierce ruthless, which led to all kinds of excesses starting with the treatment of the cargo. An example of such excesses is the infamous zone massacre of November 1781.
Luke Colingwood, the English captain of the zone, decided to throw 142 sick captives overboard when he realized that insurers would not compensate him for their natural death. Sacred Hunger features a similar situation, except that the white crew and the black cargo killed the captain and marooned themselves in the jungle of the Atlantic coastline of Florida. So the maroons come together to survive in the wilderness and they establish a settlement based on perfect racial and social equality. The experiment is short-lived and suggests that absolute equality is no more feasible and desirable than absolute inequality.
And I'm going to leave this aside for now and I want to go back to our question about the less-affaire economy, liberalism. Sacred Hunger may be read as a warning about unbridled free market capitalism. The slaves, after all, are in extreme example of how human beings can be transformed into commodities. When market rationality spreads to all institutions and social action, it pervades human life and reduces human beings to mere homo-economic or economic beings.
Sacred Hunger takes us back to the roots of the debate between proponents of a less-affaire economy and proponents of a welfare-oriented economy. One positive effect of the Industrial Revolution is that it fostered new ideas of self-affirmation and upward mobility through free enterprise. And at such the Industrial Revolution challenged the values of the Middle Ages in which testimonies were sealed at birth. However, when this capitalist effervescence got out of control, it generated greed, corruption and violence.
And it was in need of control. It had to be controlled. And this is where the welfare state comes in. And I think this is what we learned from Sacred Hunger.
Really fascinating. Professor Lambert, thank you so much for joining us. Professor Raphael Lambert, he's written narrating the slave trade theorizing community. Thanks for joining us.
Thank you. My pleasure.